The Woes of Munich's Linux Migration

mikrorechner writes "The H Online has a writeup of the problems encountered by LiMux (Wikipedia entry), one of the most prominent Linux migration projects in the world, trying to introduce free software into the highly heterogenous IT infrastructure of the City of Munich. Quoting: 'Florian Schiessl, deputy head of Munich's LiMux project for migrating the city's public administration to Linux, has, for the first time, explained why migrating the city's computing landscape to open source software has taken longer than originally planned.'" Here is Shiessl's blog, in which he details some of the transition problems.

Comments

Because every project is late

[0racle]

Everyone always underestimates how long anything non-trivial is going to take. In this case it seems like not only were they trying to migrate to a new platform, but also trying to undo every past mistake, oversight and quickly implemented solutions that appeared on the surface to work just fine. That's going to take just a little while to get done.

Re:Because every project is late

[Locutus]

but it sounds like most of the problems were due to underestimating how many non-standard development tools and products were used and the trouble getting those over to GNU/Linux. Many of them required either the original vendor to port to an open standard or replacing the existing product with one which was based on open standards. The first option meant that most likely a Microsoft Partner Program member would have to be hired to provide the same product for the GNU/Linux clients. This might normally be an easier option except being a _Microsoft Partner_ often times means you are not allowed to work on other platforms. So the 2nd option is most likely their only choice and that is more expensive in that it would require all users to change the underlying software they currently use for the task.

All in all, this sounds like confirmation that Microsoft's strategy of proprietary API's and patented IP was successful in making it costly to leave their platform. It also shows that it is not impossible and in the long run, it will probably be shown that getting off the Microsoft treadmill might be expensive up front but over time, become very cost effective. Rip and Replace most often ends up resulting in a better, faster, cheaper solution when managed well.

LoB

Re:There is no free lunch

[Sir_Lewk]

Or you know.. buy an open system....

Bad title is bad.

[Statecraftsman]

I recommend to read the blog as it's more informative and it's also rather optimistic. Not just woes as the title would lead you to believe. Of course making the switch to free software takes work, but it's a great opportunity for constant improvement and as Mr. Shiessl points out, there is much digital waste to be cleaned up on exit from the proprietary.

No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[khasim]

The advantage with FOSS is that Germany can hire German programmers to modify the software used by Munich's government (which is also German).

If they stuck with proprietary products, who would they be paying to improve it?

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Em Emalb]

The advantage with FOSS is that Germany can hire German programmers to modify the software used by Munich's government (which is also German).

If they stuck with proprietary products, who would they be paying to improve it?

This is an insightful post. However, I firmly believe if a US poster made this comment (about the US government) their comment would be labeled a troll comment.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Maxo-Texas]

The benefit is if they develop an open source permit system, then many people can use it for free.
Many people will contribute to the open source permit system.

If it's based on open standards, then other folks will be able to develop compatible permit systems in the future.

They won't have to buy a copy for version 1992, then version 1995, then version 1998, then version 1998se, then version 2000, then version 2003, then version 2005, then version 2006, and finally for version 2010.

With closed data and closed source- you pay and pay and pay. (and will continue to pay in the future).

And it they go belly up or stop supporting the product, then you are really screwed.

---

All of my personal software stack except dragon dictate is now opensource products that use open source data formats (and support most proprietary formats as well).

When the 2007 versions of office came out- they were damn hard to climb the learning curve (about 5-7 months to get back full productivity and some of my 2003 documents became unprintable-- which I solved by moving them to openoffice).

Munich had a real hairball. At the end of the move, their systems will be much cleaner. And they won't have to rebuy the same software 10 more times over the next 30 years (if the current track record holds).

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[tftp]

They are going to stop spending money on licensing fees and start spending it on "in house development". What I'm curious about is the real difference between the two.

A licensing fee, especially one that is sent abroad, is not contributing to the education or employment of citizens of the country. If you hire local developers, they will become good at programming and will be able to design more software later. This is exactly the question of giving a man a fish or a fishing rod.

If you take this situation to the extreme, as an illustration, you can have a country that spends $100M yearly on licensing and still has not a single programmer who can write "Hello, World". This means that those $100M will have to be spent year after year.

Re:No free lunch, but a range of benefits.

[Bert64]

Buying proprietary software doesn't benefit everyone, it only benefits the single vendor of that software (to your own detriment often, as you get locked in)...
Buying locally shifts that benefit away from a single foreign entity, to one or more local entities which is beneficial for government who get their tax revenue from those same local entities.

However, by using open source they are contributing benefits to everyone... Any development they contribute back will benefit everyone, even any bug reports they make will ultimately benefit the community as a whole.

Here's his problem...

[MikeRT]

Previously, around 1,000 staff had been maintaining the 15,000 PCs making up the Munich computing landscape in 21 independent IT centres. There was, according to Schießl, no common directory, no common user management, no common hardware or software management. There were more than 300 applications in use, many of which did the same job. On the desktop side, there were 21 different Windows systems with different update levels and security settings

You can't convert a bureaucracy like this anymore than you can build a political/military empire by invading a dozen good size countries and trying to integrate them all at once. Rome wasn't built in a day. They should have gone in first with the intention of standardizing things, straightening out all of the kinks and quirks each little fief had. All of the file servers here where possible, all OpenOffice there...

problem: poor standards compliance

[Onymous Coward]

More to the point: Moving away from a vendor-locked-in infrastructure is hard.

Any time you build on top of quirks and such that deviate from standardized protocols, upgrading will be hard.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Sir_Lewk]

Aaaah, I see now. If once piece of software is rubbish, then surely any other pieces of software under the same license must also be rubbish!

With this in mind I think it is safe to say that we can write off proprietary software from seriously competeing in the real world, you would not believe how many stories about proprietary software messing up I can find...

What is that? That's not actually what you were claiming, you were just being offtopic? Oh, I see...

Re:how much did this all cost?

[Josef Meixner]

They hope to save in the future. As a lot of the costs are consolidating their terrible IT landscape it is not clear, what a migration to the latest MS offering would have costs, either. It is not as if it would have been free either, who knows how many of the macros would have broken down when run in a current version of Excel, who knows how many old programs might stop working on Vista (and be it due to a stupid installer). It would have been cheaper, at least probably because a lot would have still worked, but when they write that they found 21 different Windows setups with differing patch levels and security settings, I am not so sure if it really would have been cheaper.

What they probably hope is, that the next migration will be cheaper, the OSS they use won't cost them to upgrade, the costs of the upgrade in work to be done by their IT department are probably not very different when upgrading a Linux solution from a MS solution. But all the work to get their systems closer to a common base might actually make the next big roll out simpler and therefor cheaper.

Perspective

[Locke2005]

How does this compare to the problems experienced by people migrating 15,000 clients running various Windows releases to Windows 7? Is migrating to Linux more or less costly than migrating to the latest release out of Redmond?

Re:Why so prominent?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Why is the Linux migration project in Munich so prominent, as mentioned in TFS?

Because the guy who wrote it is German and lives in Munich.

There's nothing stopping you from writing up a submission about Banco do Brasil yourself. You seem to have access to a source with a whole bunch of good information, I'm sure a success story like the one you described would get coverage on slashdot too if someone made the effort to submit it.